Report: Rift between Abbas and Fayyad

A quiet rift has formed in the last few days between Chairman Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority (PA) and PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, according to a Monday-morning report by the London-based Arabic daily Al-Quds Al-'Arabi. The cause of the crisis is Fayyad's decision not to attend a meeting that had been scheduled with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, last week, in which Fayyad was supposed to deliver a personal letter from Abbas. In the end, the letter was delivered by chief PA negotiator Saeb Erekat and Majd Farj, head of PA General Intelligence.

It was reported, last week, that Fayyad said, in closed conversations, that he refused to deliver the letter to Netanyahu because he was not involved in the drafting of the letter, not a member of Abbas's Fatah faction and "not the Fatah movement's courier". According to the newspaper, Abbas refused to answer Fayyad's calls and his office refuses to set a date for the two to discuss changing the formation of the PA government.